Storwize V3500 operating environment

To use the system, you must meet the minimum hardware and machine code requirements and ensure that other operating environment criteria are met.

RAID MDisk features

You can use the Storwize® V3500 management GUI or the command-line interface (CLI) to create a RAID MDisk from the local drives. RAID (other than RAID 0) offers redundancy and the ability to recover from the physical failure of a drive.

A RAID MDisk can be composed of flash drives or hard disk drives (HDDs).

Distributed array features

These arrays, which can contain 4 - 128 drives, also contain rebuild areas that are used to maintain redundancy after a drive fails.

Supported RAID levels are Distributed RAID 5 and Distributed RAID 6

To enhance performance of a distributed array, all of the drives must come from the same, or superior, drive class. Each drive class is identified by its drive_class_id.

Drive features

HDDs include these features:
  • Each drive is a 2.5-inch or a 3.5-inch serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drive.
  • Drives are hot-pluggable and hot-swappable.

Supported hosts

SAN fabric function is available only if a Fibre Channel option is installed. Otherwise, this information does not apply.

In a storage area network (SAN) environment, host systems are application servers that access data from the storage controllers that are connected to the SAN. Hosts that are running in a number of operating environments can connect to the storage by using the Storwize V3500.

For a list of the supported host operating systems, see http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss

Multipathing software

For more information, see http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss

User interfaces

The Storwize V3500 system provides these user interfaces:

  • The management GUI, a web-accessible graphical user interface (GUI) that supports flexible and rapid access to storage management information
  • A command-line interface (CLI) that uses Secure Shell (SSH)
  • Service assistant, a web application that helps troubleshoot and resolve problems on a node canister

Application programming interfaces

The Storwize V3500 system provides an application programming interface that is called the Common Information Model (CIM) agent. The CIM agent supports the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) of the Storage Network Industry Association.